The Nature of Scientific Creativity
Sunday, April 8
4:00 p.m. – 5:00 p.m.
Auditorium between 4&5, level 0, Room 0215
As a creative product, science is the result of imagination (illogical) and abstract thinking (logical). The traditional explanation for the way science works privileges deduction and induction. However, the creative part of the process of scientific inquiry emphasizes abductive inference as a crucial bridge in the logic of discovery and the logic of justification needed for scientific closure.
Only people who can merge imagination with abstractive thinking can produce a creative product. In this lecture, we see how Peirce’s abduction (creativity) and Popper’s falsifiabilty (“criticality”) through induction and deduction inform how science tries to seek the best explanation. This is in the tradition of Occam’s razor. Creativity requires abductive inference which is an erratic and chaotic process.
Hosted by Prof. Himanshu Mishra (Contact: 054 470 0959)
Measuring Science – From Aristotle to Hirsch and beyond
Monday, April 9
3:00 p.m. – 5:00 p.m.
Building 4, Level 5, Room 5220
Quantity and quality are Aristotelian categories. Ever since Galileo, the defining feature of Science is the accurate measure of quantity, e.g., time, length and mass, to begin with. Length and mass are size dependent. Quality remained an elusive category as it is a size-independent feature. It was Archimedes who first brought a revolution in physics by defining density as a size-independent attribute. A similar revolution was effected in the measurement of science when Eugene Garfield introduced the concept of the citation as a unit of measurement and from this, separated quantity (number of publications) from quality (impact). In this lecture, we interpret impact as a thermodynamic mean instead of a simplistic arithmetic mean. This opens up rich analogies with the conservation laws of mechanics and thermodynamic features linking disorder and unevenness to entropy. Also as in physics, considerations of dimensional homogeneity play a defining role. Without Garfield’s bold initiative, all this will have eluded us for some time.
Hosted by Dr. Vijaykumar and Prof. Himanshu Mishra
Dr. Gangan Prathap is currently a professor at APJ Abdul Kalam Technological University, Thiruvananthapuram and the Vidya Academy of Science and Technology, Thrissur. He was trained as an aerospace engineer and specialized in mathematical modeling and computer simulation of complex problems in aerospace engineering. For more than thirty years, he has also pursued a parallel interest in research evaluation, bibliometrics and scientometrics and the application of physical and mathematical insights for research assessment. In recent years, he has proposed a thermodynamic basis for bibliometric sequences which can lead to better indicators for research evaluation like the p-index, z-index and the EEE-sequences. He has served at many premier institutions in India such as the CSIR-NAL, CSIR-C-MMACS (now CSIR 4PI), CUSAT, CSIR-NISCAIR and CSIR-NIIST.